Understanding The US Political Crisis - Part 14

The Underpinning Of Social Democracy

The decline in the power of big industrial capital brings with it a decline in the support of the social-democratic ideology, which serves its interests. In part, that is because that social-democratic ideal has failed to live up to its part of the bargain, for the workers, that their living standards would continue to rise. In fact, this Autumn Phase of the Long Wave cycle has always been the time when revolutions and upsurges of worker discontent have developed, e.g. 1917-26, 1974-84.

But, a problem then exists. Bourgeois political parties, like capitalist firms, will only try to sell what they think their particular market segment will buy. Conservative parties will always focus their appeal on their core membership, amongst the small capitalists, and backward layers of the middle and working classes. During periods of boom, when industrial-capital and social democracy is stronger, for example during the post-war boom, they will tack more in the direction of social democracy, as the the representatives of the interests of the big capitalists in their midst will become stronger. Outside those times, although they are forced by material conditions, by the objective reality that big industrial capital continues to be the source of surplus value, to keep the foundations of a bourgeois social democracy in place, they will tack in the other direction, to mollify the concerns of their core membership.

In his Inaugural Address to the First International,
 Marx said, of the workers' co-operatives
"The value of these great social experiments cannot
 be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they
 have shown that production, on a large scale,
 and in accord with the behests of modern science,
may be carried on without the existence of a class of
 masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit,
 the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means
 of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring
 man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour,
 hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined
 to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with
 a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart."

Social-democratic parties, like the Labour Party in the UK and the Democrats in the US, will do likewise. It is no good sectarians decrying these social-democrats for failing to put forward socialist policies – they are not socialists! They will only advance policies they think will win votes. Without a substantial change in the dominant ideology of the working-class, and sections of the middle class, there is no possibility of winning votes with more radical policies. More radical parties have continually tried that over the last century and failed miserably. The only way the ideology of the workers and middle class will change is if the material conditions of their existence change.

In other words, they must see in practice, and come to believe that a new type of society based on co-operative production, via direct workers ownership and control of the means of production is not only possible, but is superior to the capitalist system. Workers have seen the dismal and horrific failure of state ownership in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, as well as a similar failure of state capitalism in western Europe. The attempts of Left Social-Democrats, to attract workers to those failed alternatives, however dressed up as being revolutionary or transitional, is forlorn, and only results in workers continuing to lend their support to reactionary parties, or none at all.

In the absence of that, workers when disillusioned with social democracy, either abstain or vote for some reactionary alternative. But, conservative parties also then face a problem. On the one hand, they must adhere to their programme, determined by the reactionary base of such parties. On the other, this comes into continual conflict with the reality of modern capitalism, the determining role of big industrial capital, and the bourgeois social democratic state.

Moreover, under such conditions, the conflicting interests between merchant, money, and productive-capital may begin to break down in favour of a division merely between big and small capital, and this will again find its reflection in the realm of ideas, as presented by the fragmentation of existing political forces.

The interests, therefore, of small capital, takes on its more radical, pure form in the shape of the Libertarian wings of these Conservative parties, in the shape of the Tea Party in the US, and UKIP in the UK. In turn, this creates its own political dynamic, driving these Conservative parties ever rightwards in order to avoid losing its core constituency.

“During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counter revolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou shalt conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: “property, family, religion, order.” Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an “attempt on society” and stigmatized as “socialism.” And finally the high priests of “religion and order” themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement – in the name of property, of the family, of religion, and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the hero Crapulinski [a character from Heine’s poem “The Two Knights,” a dissolute aristocrat.] installs himself in the Tuileries as the “saviour of society.””

(Marx – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

The situation in the US, with the Tea Party representing a very narrow section of interest, and yet holding to ransom the Republican Party, which in turn holds to ransom the state itself, is a reflection of exactly the same kind of process. It has also been manifest in European Conservative parties facing fragmentation to their right, including in the UK.

Back To Part 13